Prageeth Eknelygoda

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Dear President Sirisena, As your government's post-election 100-day agenda nears completion the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international press freedom organization, recognizes your early endeavors in keeping promises to ensure media freedom. CPJ would like to request a meeting with you and your government to discuss the problems that persist for the country's media.

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Dear President Sirisena: The Committee to Protect Journalists, an international press freedom organization, is writing to congratulate you on your recent victory in Sri Lanka's presidential election. As Sri Lanka readies itself for a new chapter in its history, we urge your government to take concrete and meaningful steps to improve the climate for press freedom.

The stunning defeat of Sri Lanka's incumbent president Mahinda Rajapaksa by challenger Maithripala Sirisena on Friday has given way to questions about what changes, if any, will come for press freedom in a country that had grown deeply repressive under the previous leadership.

In Sri Lanka, where there has seldom been good news for the
media in recent years, things have taken a further turn for the worse, as well
as a turn for the bizarre. With President Mahinda Rajapaksa's government secure
in its 2010 electoral mandate, its leaders have made fresh moves to tighten
their control of the press. There is a plan afoot to re-criminalize defamation,
and legislation has been proposed for a code of ethics that threatens to give the
government a legal basis to quash journalism it deems "unethical." All this comes
ahead of November's Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in Colombo,
which seems sure to go ahead despite calls for boycotts from several quarters
because of the government's poor human rights record.

Black January commemorations in Colombo have become an annual
event. Tuesday's demonstration was the second. The protest aims to recall
the series of killings and attacks on journalists in Sri Lanka in recent years,
many of them occurring in Januaries past. All of them have gone untried and
unpunished, sustaining the country's perfect record
of impunity for those who want to silence media by murder.

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Three years ago, on January 24, 2010, columnist and cartoonistPrageeth Eknelygoda vanished
on his way to work to cover the final campaigning in Sri Lanka's bitterly
contested presidential election. He has not been heard from since. The pro-opposition
website he worked for, Lanka eNews, has been repeatedly
attacked,
its offices hit with arson, its staff arrested
and harassed,
its editor driven into exile in England.

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When I first met Sandhya Eknelygoda in May
2010 in her home outside Colombo, she was a distressed mother of two young
boys whose husband had gone missing. He was last seen four months earlier, just
prior to the elections that returned President Mahinda Rajapaksa to power after
the end of the decades-long war with Tamil secessionists. She still has no
inkling of the whereabouts of her husband Prageeth, a cartoonist and columnist
for the opposition website Lanka eNews (which has since ceased
to operate in Sri Lanka because of arson
attacks and legal harassment
of its staff, but is maintained overseas).

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Former
Attorney General Mohan Peiris has been ordered to testify about a statement he
made at the U.N. Committee Against Torture in Geneva on November 9, 2011, in
which he said that Prageeth
Eknelygoda was alive and living outside the country (see "Sri
Lanka's savage smokescreen"). Peiris will have to appear at the Homogama
Magistrate's Court in Colombo on June 5, next Tuesday, which has been hearing
the case brought by Eknelygoda's wife, Sandhya, to learn more about his disappearance
on January 24, 2010.